Ken Coleman Joins Andreessen Horowitz as Special Adviser

Andreessen Horowitz has named longtime Silicon Valley executive Ken Coleman–a mentor to the firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz–as a special adviser.

Ken Coleman

Ken Coleman, who has been named a special adviser at Andreessen Horowitz.

In 1986, Coleman, who was then the head of administration at Silicon Graphics, hired a 20-year-old Horowitz as a summer intern, giving him his first job in the computer industry. Silicon Graphics was the Google of its day, Horowitz wrote in a blog post Thursday announcing Coleman’s hiring–”the place where all the best engineers wanted to work [and] I thought that I had died and gone to heaven.”

Coleman prepared him for life inside a big corporation, Horowitz wrote, teaching him not to attack or personally insult people when he didn’t agree with their ideas.

Horowitz, meanwhile, went back to school at Columbia University and eventually returned to Silicon Valley to live and work. Over the years, the two have kept in touch, with Coleman providing advice and guidance on how to build the right kind of corporate culture and lead and manage a large, complex organization, according to Horowitz.

“At this point, I am now considered pretty good at mentoring and management, and it’s great to be able to bring on somebody who’s better than me,” Horowitz said in an interview.

Coleman said he’s “seen or made every mistake you can make in building a company,” and he plans to use that experience to advise Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies.

He said the two biggest lessons he’s learned in his own career are that businesses are about people–”with great talent you can accomplish anything and without talent, nothing’s possible,” he said–and that you can’t be blinded by your own biases and experience. You have to learn “how to understand more.”

Coleman was also an avid networker long before LinkedIn, he said. When he read or heard about someone who sounded interesting, he would write to them and ask if they could talk, and “lo and behold, I woke up one day and that network was a very valuable thing.”

Coleman is Andreessen Horowitz’s third special adviser. The other two are former Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty and former Secretary of the Treasury and President Emeritus of Harvard University Lawrence Summers.

Write to Deborah Gage at deborah.gage@dowjones.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deborahgage

About Venture Capital Dispatch

Produced by the editors of Dow Jones VentureWire, Venture Capital Dispatch tracks the fast-moving developments at the intersection of high-tech innovation and venture capital finance. Featuring the VentureWire reporting team in the Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Shanghai tech centers, Venture Capital Dispatch provides insight into the newest start-ups and latest trends in venture capital investing. Write us at VCdispatch@dowjones.com. For more information on Dow Jones products covering venture capital and other financial markets, go to http://pevc.dowjones.com.